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By Maureen O’Hare, CNN

(CNN) — In our roundup of travel stories this week: what it’s like inside Air New Zealand’s new bunk beds, why cruise ships are adding a phantom destination to their itinerary, plus the dark fascist secret that lies under one of Europe’s biggest train stations.

Tragic legacy

It’s a little over 80 years since the end of World War II, but the legacy of that dark period of history lingers on.

In Italy, Milan’s main train station is a tourist attraction in its own right. Its monumental facade is festooned with statues of winged horses and gargoyles, and inside, vast staircases sweep up to the 21-platform departure hall.

However, beneath Milano Centrale’s main passenger facilities lies a concealed platform which, during World War II, was used by Italy’s Nazi occupiers and fascist sympathizers to dispatch Jews and political opponents to death camps. It’s the only place of Nazi deportation to still exist intact.

On the remote Pacific island of Peleliu in Palau, one of the bloodiest and least remembered battles of World War II’s Pacific theater took place nearly 82 years ago.

In September 1944, American troops arrived on the island for what they believed to be a straightforward mission of destroying a Japanese air base. Unknown to the Americans, and unspotted by their air reconnaissance, Peleliu is full of deep underground cave networks, which the Japanese had fortified and stocked with food, water and ammunition.

The Battle of Peleliu dragged on for two long, grim months, claiming the lives of about 14,000 Japanese and 10,000 Americans. Today, tourists come from thousands of miles away to remember the tragic loss.

Set the coordinates

Back near the start of the 20th century, experts at the US Coast and Geodetic Survey attempted to find the center of what was then the United States’ 48 states. They did this by the unusual method of cutting out a cardboard map of the country and balancing it on the head of a pin to find its center of gravity.

The pivot point turned out to be in northern Kansas, just outside a town called Lebanon. Here’s what CNN found there today.

For CNN subscribers, here are two more stories of cartographic curios.

Utqiaġvik, Alaska, is the northernmost city in the United States. It’s accessible only by plane or summertime barge and it’s a place where Indigenous Iñupiat culture runs deep.

Our second destination is a little harder to find — because it doesn’t exist. Null Island is a phantom destination off the coast of West Africa and is the result of a frequent error on digital mapping tools. Now cruise ships are adding this nowhere-place to their itineraries.

Destination inspiration

Planning travels for 2026? Here are two off-the-radar urban destinations for your consideration.

Canberra, Australia’s capital city, doesn’t have a beachfront like Melbourne or an iconic Opera House like Sydney. It is, even its historians say, an artificially planned city “plonked in the middle of nowhere.”

However this experimental “bush city,” designed to settle an argument, is a place of world-

By Eric Bradner, CNN

(CNN) — Democrats’ governance in one of the bluest states in America is being put to the test Tuesday, as California voters in primaries for governor and Los Angeles mayor weigh crowded fields led by relatively weak or unpopular frontrunners.

President Donald Trump may be less popular with voters now than he’s ever been. But Democrats are battling their own political problems: Polls show voters overwhelmingly disapprove of the party. A botched Democratic National Committee report and a Jill Biden book tour have reignited debates over the party’s mistakes in 2024 — distracting from efforts to win House and Senate majorities in this November’s midterm elections.

In California, the contest to replace outgoing Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’ reelection bid share some dynamics. Both feature Democrats who have so far failed to break out of the pack — as well as conservative candidates who accuse those Democrats of being bad at their jobs.

And similar issues — concerns over homelessness and drug use, housing and affordability, crime and entertainment industry job losses — have dominated both races, with Republican candidates arguing Democrats, who have full control of the city and state governments, have failed their voters.

“The people in charge — they’re the ones letting this happen,” Spencer Pratt, the former reality television star taking on Bass, said Thursday on CNN. “I’m the one who’s saying, ‘Enough of these corrupt politicians taking our tax money and then increasing homelessness and death on our streets.’”

In a city where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans about four-to-one, the mayor’s race is nominally nonpartisan, and Pratt has sought to distance himself from party labels. But he is a registered Republican, and Democrats have sought to lump him in with Trump and highlight his ties to controversial conservative figures like Alex Jones.

Pratt launched his campaign after his home burned down in last year’s Palisades fire. He blames Bass, who was in Ghana when the fire broke out, for mismanagement of the city’s response — and is casting it as emblematic of an entrenched Democratic establishment’s failures on a host of other intractable issues, including drug use, crime and homelessness.

“It’s just not rocket science,” Pratt said. “The reason I have success is I’m telling people the truth with common sense. This isn’t political.”

California holds jungle primaries, with all candidates appearing on the same ballot. The top two vote-getters — regardless of party — advance to the general election. Polls show a wide range of possibilities in both races.

Surveys show Bass, Pratt and progressive city councilwoman Nithya Raman, who is taking Bass on from the left, are in a close race for the two spots on November’s ballot. A UC Berkeley-LA Times poll conducted May 19-24 found Bass at 26%, Raman at 25% and Pratt at 22%. The poll found that Bass was viewed unfavorably by 57% of likely voters — the same percentage that viewed Pratt unfavorably.

The governor’s race features a larger field of viable contenders. But in polls and conversations with California strategists in both parties, a consensus has formed that the two favorites to advance to the general election are Democrat Xavier Becerra and R

By Laura Paddison, CNN

(CNN) — When an underwater volcano erupted in the South Pacific in January 2022, it sent a plume of ash, steam and gas nearly 40 miles above the Earth’s surface. It was one of the most violent volcanic eruptions of modern times. It may also have also revealed a new weapon in the fight against a potent planet-heating gas, according to new research.

The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupted with a power hundreds of times stronger than the Hiroshima nuclear explosion, setting off a tsunami and a sonic boom that went around the planet twice. It then did something “unexpected,” according to the authors of the new study published Thursday in the journal Nature Communications. It started cleaning up some of its own pollution.

The scientists’ discovery came from looking at advanced satellite data of the eruption. “We found a huge cloud of formaldehyde that should normally not be there,” said Maarten van Herpen, a study author, and a physicist and executive director at Acacia Impact Innovation, a Dutch consultancy. Formaldehyde often forms when methane, a potent planet-heating gas, is destroyed in the atmosphere.

The researchers believed they were observing a chemical process that had previously been identified over the Atlantic Ocean.

Scientists had found that when Saharan dust is blown over the Atlantic, it mixes with salt spray and forms small iron-based particles. As the sunlight hits them, it produces chlorine atoms, which react with methane in the atmosphere and help break it down.

Something similar appears to have happened with the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano, according to the study. Its eruption sent enough salty water vapor into the stratosphere to fill around 58,000 Olympic-size swimming pools along with volcanic ash. The study scientists believe that when the sunlight hit the mixture, chlorine formed and broke down some of the methane produced by the eruption.

“It has emitted methane and then destroyed these emissions through the particles in the plume,” van Herpen said.

They tracked the formaldehyde cloud for 10 days. “Because formaldehyde only exists for a few hours, this showed that the cloud must have been destroying methane continuously for more than a week,” van Herpen added.

The researchers estimate the eruption produced around 330,000 tons of methane, of which around 900 tons were broken down a day.

It’s “new — and completely surprising” that the same process observed in the Atlantic appears to have played out in a volcanic plume high up in the stratosphere, said Matthew Johnson a study author and chemistry professor at the University of Copenhagen, who was involved in the 2023 discovery.

The scientists say their findings could provide a valuable new tool to tackle climate change.

Methane is around 80 times more effective at trapping heat than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. It currently accounts for around a third of global warming and concentrations in the atmosphere have doubled over the last two centuries.

Although reducing carbon pollution, which stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, is key to tackling the climate crisis, slashing methane has been seen as something of a low-hanging fruit. It’s relatively short-lived, and cutting levels co

By Tim Lister, CNN

(CNN) — For a relatively short “memorandum of understanding” (MoU), the draft agreement between the United States and Iran is taking a very long time to finalize.

That’s because language and sequencing is everything; every last word will be parsed and debated; every connection between one element and another scrutinized.

For example, will the 60-day process envisaged in the MoU be defined as an extension of the weeks-long ceasefire or a definitive end to hostilities?

Even if the MoU is just a page covering about a dozen points in brief, as many accounts have suggested, it’s not that simple.

“We have to have a diplomatic solution that is very clear on the topics they are willing to negotiate on and the extent of the concessions they are willing to make at the front end in order to make it worthwhile,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Tuesday.

The sequencing of a process that is due to unfold over two months is critical.

Where we are now

Iran and the United States reached a tentative agreement to turn the existing ceasefire into a more long-lasting settlement, US officials said Thursday.

But on Friday, President Donald Trump made a series of demands – on the Strait of Hormuz, Iran’s nuclear program and the unfreezing of Iranian assets held overseas – that did not go down well in Tehran.

Trump’s assertions, in a social media post, were “a mixture of truth and falsehood” and an attempt to project a “manufactured victory,” said the semi-official Fars news agency.

“The ‘musts’ that the Americans bring up are actually requests,” said Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei.

So it appears that the MoU is still, at best, a work in progress.

US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in Singapore Saturday that he had spoken to Trump, who “wanted me to reiterate how patient he is in ensuring that with America undertaking this kind of historic endeavor, any deal will be a good one, a great one, and he’s patient in the pursuit of that.”

Hormuz reopening a key first step

Both sides regard agreement on navigation through the Strait of Hormuz as a first step, after three months of paralysis in the critical waterway that has caused a sharp spike in the price of crude oil and other commodities.

“The Hormuz Strait must be immediately open, no tolls, for unrestricted shipping traffic, in both directions,” Trump said Friday, with Iran responsible for demining the seaway.

At the same time, the US naval blockade of Iranian ports would be lifted, Trump said.

Iran would allow shipping through the strait to return to pre-war levels over a period of 30 days, according to some accounts of the MoU. Shipping sources say the industry will want a period of sustained calm before sending vessels through.

Trump has insisted on free, unhindered navigation; Iran continues to insist it has a right to manage traffic through the international waterway, in association with Oman. Finding language to square that circle will be challenging.

Iran is pursuing “the smart management of the Strait of Hormuz,” according to Ebrahim Azizi, head of the Iranian parliament’s National Security Commission, in an interview Friday.

“Iran’s control measures and arrangements in the Strait of Hormuz are permanent in nature and certainly not temporary,” Azizi said.

Trump has warned Oman – a traditional ally of the West – against any arrangement with Iran.

“Oman will behave just like everybody else, or we’ll have to blow them up,” he said during a cabinet meeting Thursday. “They un

By Chris Isidore, CNN

(CNN) — No airline is more likely than Frontier Airlines to benefit from the demise of Spirit. But no airline is more at risk of suffering the same fate.

Financial problems and higher fuel costs tipped long-struggling budget airline Spirit over the edge when it went out of business on May 2. Frontier, which sought to merge with its low-cost rival in 2022, is well-positioned to benefit from Spirit’s absence. Its routes have the most overlap with Spirit, and both cater to budget travelers through similar business models: low-base fares coupled with extra charges for everything else.

As airlines start their critical summer travel season, Frontier may find itself in better financial shape with Spirit out of the picture — it has already raised fares on the routes it shared with Spirit. But Frontier is still vulnerable to the many problems plaguing the overall US airline industry, and especially the low-fare segment of the market.

“(Frontier) has a much stronger cash position (than Spirit had),” said Shye Gilad, a business professor at Georgetown University and former airline executive. “But I don’t dismiss the pressure that the industry is under, especially for these ultra-low-cost carriers.”

All airlines, from the upstart budget carriers to the four major US commercial airlines, are struggling with jet fuel costs. Fuel, the second largest expense for airlines after labor, is now up 30% from before the start of the war in Iran.

Most airlines are raising fares and fees to make up for higher costs. But even with fares up more than 20% from last year, airlines haven’t been able to cover all the new expenses.

And Frontier, like Spirit, was in financial trouble even before the fuel spike. The Denver-based airline lost $137 million last year when jet fuel was relatively inexpensive. In fact, the airline has bled money every year since the pandemic, aside from earning a narrow profit in 2024.

Frontier’s executives, however, dismiss doubts about its long-term future.

“We were on a very, very good trajectory in Q1 prior to the fuel price spike,” CEO James Dempsey said on an earnings call in early May just after Spirit went out of business. “We were actually going to get very close to break even in Q1 and we were certainly on a trajectory to make money in Q2.”

Low ticket prices are a good way to attract bargain-hunting leisure travelers, but a tough way to turn a profit in an industry working on thin margins. The budget model also doesn’t attract the industry’s most critical customers: those willing to pay more for a better flying experience. That includes first class or business class, but also the premium seats in the middle of the plane that offer slightly more legroom, priority boarding and less time to exit the plane upon landing.

The three largest airlines — Delta, United and American — now earn the majority of their profits from those passengers. Delta reported that revenue from premium seats essentially matched its main cabin and basic economy revenue in the first quarter.

But it’s more than just low fares and profit margins working against Frontier. Airlines are also, first and foremost, a service industry, and Frontier has a poor reputation for customer service.

The JD Power rankings of airline customer satisfaction put Frontier dead last — behind even Spirit, whose low rankings were a big reason it had to shut down.

“Their service isn’t as good as (major carriers). It’s as simple as that,” said Michael Boyd, an airline industry consultant.